DivKid's Month Of Modular Issue #1 October 2015 | Page 5

Hi Benjamin, so we've been working together

on promoting RYO products with my videos

since RYO's first module the Optodist.

How did that module come about? Why use

vactrols in it and LED based limiting?

It was a bit surprising to see how few options for distortion there was in Eurorack at the time, let alone with voltage control. We wanted to do something that was unusual even for guitar distortion pedals and would work well for synth sounds. After several experiments with different ideas for distortion designs and both OTA and vactrol based voltage control, we settled for a vactrol and TL072 based design because we really liked the way it sounded and it was indeed a bit different to what had been previously explored in this field.

It did the job for overdrive and distortion well but it also had this smudgy smooth character to it that we hadn't heard much in other distortion designs. The vactrols response to control voltages sounded really good with the overall distortion character of the module. The idea of the limiter was to tame the output a bit but we also found that using LEDs sounded really nice, and worked fittingly together with the name Optodist.

We chose to have the limiter switchable and an input level attenuator to add as much range and usability as we could, from a gentle VCA with minimal distortion or a smooth overdrive and all the way to full crank. We find that it always add something pleasant to the sound at practically any setting.

Tell us a bit about RYO in general, who's involved, where are you based, when did you start the company?

My interest in synths and music production much originated from softwares such as Reason and vst plugins, I bought my first hardware synth as late as 2009, a Korg MS2000R, and after that I was pretty much hooked by the fun and directness of hardware synths and not too long after I had gathered up a little synth setup. Andreas has had a background in programming and some hobby electronics and shortly after we got together he started to find an interest in music equipment as well.

We got started with modular around the autumn of 2011 when we bought a Doepfer eurorack case and a couple of modules, the whole concept of modular synthesis was quite new to us so it was an initially baffling process to get the grips of this machine, so shortly thereafter we started hanging out on music forums and IRC chatrooms such as Muffwiggler and 99musik here in Sweden.